


no time not to shoot

by Jayne L (JayneL)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s05e04 The End, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-14
Updated: 2014-08-14
Packaged: 2018-02-13 03:21:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2135145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayneL/pseuds/Jayne%20L
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jody Mills in Endverse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no time not to shoot

**Author's Note:**

> It's August 2014. The End is nigh.

Jody can't kill her son. She can't do it. She can't do anything as he stumbles mindlessly over Sean's body, her husband's blood and guts smeared all over Owen's mouth like that birthday cake the year he turned two. She can't move. She can't think.

Bobby's friend Dean bursts through her door with his shotgun already raised. She can barely squeeze her eyes shut before the blast.

(She overhears them talking about it later, when she drops by Bobby's place to be a little less alone after the clean-up. She's climbing the stairs onto the porch, and the door's still hanging off its hinges, and she hears Dean say, unforgivingly, "Three more steps and she'd've been chewed open like her husband. No time not to shoot." It's punctuated by the ping and clatter of a bottlecap hitting the sink.

Whatever they're drinking, Bobby sounds like he wants to drown himself in the bottle. "He was her kid, Dean."

"Yeah, and Karen was your wife."

In the ugly silence that follows, Jody turns around and gets back in her jeep and drives away.)

There is no world in which Jody can kill her son.

Croats, though.

She knows she's not exactly high on Bobby's list of contacts who can do much in his kind of crisis. Still, by the time he gets around to calling her about the virus, she's already spent a couple high-stress days dealing with cells full of ragers that'd make Tarantino queasy. She'd figured some things out for herself, by then. She'd figured out there's nothing to do with a croat _but_ kill it.

The day the official quarantine regs come down the pike--written by either well-meaning folks at the CDC who have no goddamn clue just how much of a goddamn clue they don’t have, or well-meaning folks at the CDC co-opted by evil-intentioned demonic bastards--Jody walks right off the job. Keeps her badge and uniform and gun, because you never know what might come in handy in an apocalypse--packs a duffel with a few more guns and a lot more ammo, because ditto--and goes straight to Bobby's.

They're packing the place up. Bobby and Dean and another hunter named Cas who doesn't say much and moves like he's almost, but not quite, over an injury. There's a camp, Bobby tells her, as the boys lug boxes of books and weapons and tools and machine parts from the house to Dean's dusty car and an old, rusty behemoth of a truck. They've gathered some hunters together with some sitting-duck civilians and are regrouping at this camp, a centralised location in the middle of nowhere. In theory, Bobby says, it should be easy to protect.

In theory, Jody thinks, eying Dean's brusque movements and Cas's careful ones and Bobby's weary slouch in his chair, it'll be easier to contain than a cell block packed with croats.

"Thanks for the offer," she says, "but it looks like you guys've got this camp in-hand, and there's gotta be something else that needs taking care of. What can I do?"

She spends the next year or so moving from one branch of the hunters' network to another, because as it turns out, a legitimate sheriff's badge and uniform--and the procedural know-how that comes with them--are pretty damn handy indeed in an apocalypse, especially one taking such shameless advantage of the failures of human government and bureaucracy. She helps a cluster of small towns in Minnesota avoid the heavy tread of federal Croatoan paranoia while the local hunters work to counter the effects of a curse-happy coven. She does the same in Montana, buying a friend of Bobby's time to track down and take out an okami. She clears some red tape for a hunter in Nebraska, then helps her rescue a kidnapped kid from a family of vampires and return her to her grandmother. 

She lands on Lee Chambers' doorstep in Oklahoma two days before they close the Texas border. Over the next month, while they work together to smuggle out uninfected Texan refugees, Jody falls in love with Lee's daughter.

Krissy is older than Owen would've been, and not much like him otherwise, either: where he liked storytime and trains and cocoa, Krissy likes asking blunt questions and helping her father do his work and drinking black coffee. She's guarded and cynical, way too much so for someone her age; but then, between croats and demons and President Palin's policies and the ever-growing feeling that their hard work against all that crap amounts to whistling Dixie down the river Styx, Jody's pretty sure anyone who's _not_ guarded and cynical is probably dead, or soon will be. But Krissy misses her mom, though she'd never admit it where her dad could hear; and Jody misses being a mom, and kind of sucks at hiding it.

One night, a demon infiltrates their group of evacuees and infects them all: the entire group turns within spitting distance of the safehouse on the Oklahoma side of the border. Jody and Lee give the hard-packed, drought-dry dirt of the yard a croat bloodbath, then lead Krissy, and the few remaining uninfected refugees holed up in the house, right past the carnage in order to get away before a patrol can respond to the noise of their gunfire.

"I don't know if I could do it," Lee confesses later on the creaking porch of their new safehouse, forearms braced on the railing, head bowed over his folded hands. His voice is husky with exhaustion, quavering with emotion. "If Krissy ever got infected, I don't--I don't think I could--"

Slouched against the wall, Jody thinks about the percussion of a shotgun blast, the white echo of it on the inside of her squeezed-tight eyelids blanking out the afterimage of the last thing she'd seen. She takes a pull from her lukewarm beer. "It's okay, Lee," she tells him. She sounds like a pack-a-day lifetime smoker, but her voice is even. "You won't have to."


End file.
